How Religion Influences The Brain

              My project has an artistic focus on how our religions are illustrated in the human brain. Each ritual, action, or prayer affects different regions of our brain, that control different things. I researched what impact religion has on the human brain. I wanted to figure out how religion works biologically in your brain and if different religions affected the brain differently. The answer to my question is that the brain has many functions that benefit humans while practicing a religion. The brain has the ability to recognize holism, the concept that different functions of the brain are the outcome of the brain working together to achieve this. In holistic sense, our brains allow for us to expand on religion due to this holistic notion encompassing God as a whole and different aspects of our world being pieced together to create God. The quantative part of the brain helps us decipher science and scientific concepts. When an idea is proposed, say in the bible along with a number, it makes the notion more comprehensible in our heads and may even strengthen our beliefs. The binary function of the brain allows us to compare and contrast two pieces of information. This offers us the option to decide which concepts make sense and which resonate, which is crucial in studying a religion. Happenings in the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, the prefrontal cortex, along with the frontal lobes, have been benefitted due to meditation.

       Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscience professor at the Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital located in Villanova, PA conducted an 8-week study to prove that 12 minutes of mantra-based meditation daily, will help improve memory issues. Newberg concluded that the individual's memories had improved by about 10-15%. This reflects the biological benefits of practicing a religion and meditation on the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, and the prefrontal cortex. Newberg records Catholic nuns and Buddhists to have greater activity in the frontal lobes of the brain, which are associated with focus, planning and attention. It is also found that occurrences in the parietal lobes, which manage matching information in chronological order and organizing timing (temporal and spatial orientation), have decreased.

"They had improvements of about 10 or 15 percent," Newberg says. "This is only after eight weeks at 12 minutes a day, so you can imagine what happens in people who are deeply religious and spiritual and are doing these practices for hours a day for years and years."  -NPR Interview with Andrew Newberg